One Month Ampuversary!!!

Yes, we’ve reached that wonderful one month milestone!  We are so overjoyed with his progress and how well he is doing.  Porter is 100% off his pain meds, and his personality is completely back to his old self, which we are so happy with.  He is also LOVING his new food – he devours it immediately (and licks the bowl).  We were relying on the canned tuna because it was easy, but our acupuncturist said we shouldn’t have more than 3 meals a week of tuna.  Which meant a trip to the URM for bulk meat!  Chicken legs and sirloins it was – and at $1 and $2.50 a pound respectively, a great buy.  I cut out all the raw chicken bones and froze them because our massage therapist wants him to have several bones a week (for the marrow – it supports his joints).  Speaking of joints, we also added a few more supplements to help his joints.  We added FlexNow (a shea nut based cartilage and joint pill) and Trixsyn (hyleronic acid, which is the most important part of chondroitin).  He loves them all!

Porter also had a big milestone last week – he got back to his volunteer work!  We told the staff that we would let Porter tell us if he was tired and needed to stop.  My boy, of course he went the whole hour!  We brought along a yoga mat to help his grip when he sat for visits.  Now here’s the very universally strange part.  The Shriner’s Hospital mostly does osteopathic operations, and most of the kids we’ve seen have had spine and bone growth issues.  But on this visit, we saw our first partial amputee kid – really?!?!  He didn’t speak English (so I wasn’t sure if he got the relevance of Porter’s missing leg and how great he was doing) but he sure seemed to love him.  The nurses were all so happy to see him, and most of his visits were able to take place on the floor (most don’t because the kids are in beds and on meds).  I’d love to post a photo, but we can’t because of medical privacy.  He also did his first visit at the Alzheimers facility, and then went great too – although he did a LOT more visits there and seemed to get tired more quickly.

Porter saw the vet for a 2 week post-chemo blood draw.  Results came back good – his blood counts were on the low end of normal, which Dr. Brown expected.  He got the go-ahead for his second round of chemo next week.  He did explain that at some point, his blood counts would likely drop too low and we’d have to delay a treatment.  But I already knew that thanks to reading everything from other Tripawds – thanks guys!

Porter is running, and spending lots of time on the couch (strangely he seems to expect it now, when before he always had to wait for an invite).  I think he knows that he will be spoiled from now on!